Tierra del Fuego

These nine spellbinding stories of adventure, exploration and voyage are peopled with ravenous explorers, fortune hunters, foreign revolutionaries, ill-fated seafarers, intrepid ship's captains, and ruthless smugglers. But the undeniable protagonist around which these characters gravitate is nature itself. Southern Chile, the world's end, with its severe beauty—cold, inhospitable, treacherous, desolate—finds its ideal poet in Francisco Coloane. In his stories, this stern landscape rises like a definitive symbol of the elementary and ceaseless drama of human passions. Coloane is a master storyteller, deftly distilling the universal from the particular and the extreme. But no abstraction of this kind can do these tales justice. Their enduring beauty lies in the forceful, gripping narrative and the elements that principally comprise this narrative: men, their crimes and their passions: and the land itself in all its breathtaking glory and its murderous wrath.